Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past
By Viridian
The family interactions and how Harry is learning to fit in are very well written.
When Harry said, "I could just AK them and ask for her next choice,' I snorted - that's hysterical.
Great confrontation with Dumbledore.
"Harry found himself grinding his teeth. If they give me to the Malfoys I’ll just have to Avada Kedavra them on the spot and tell Madam Bones to pick again."
That is without a doubt the single best line of fanfiction I have ever, or will ever, read.
My god that is great.
I love all of your story, and I cannot wait for more! One thing, though. That line that Harry thinks: "If they give me to the Malfoys I’ll just have to Avada Kedavra them on the spot and tell Madam Bones to pick again." I would so love to see an OMAKE about the court's reaction to an eleven-year-old successfully casting the AK! Anyway, keep up the good work, and please update soon!
Your long chapters are so easy to get lost in, ans there are no distractions. I read to escape and a chapter like this lets me.
I'm so tired now that the keyboard keys are moving around. Mot when I stare right at them, but only along the edges.
Truly a wonderful story.
"Ron, full sentences and the Queen’s English, please.” Ha! Usually it's Hermione that speaks in cryptic sentence fragments and expects her friends to follow her maglev bullet train of thought...
Speaking of sentence fragments, Gred and Forge are beginning to sound a bit like Xamot and Tomax; they really don't switch off *that* often in canon.
I'm really looking forward to Harry explaining to his friends what's going on; all the secrecy and manipulation is hurting his relations with them in spite of his best efforts, and it'll be a relief when they're in on it. (And, in some ways, a bigger relief when most of the secrets he knows have been used and he's back on a more equal footing with them, with no more idea what's coming next in the altered timeline than they have.) In particular, I think it would be helpful to get Hermione's input on his ideas for handling upcoming events and adjusting the timeline.
"since it didn’t involve actual spell-casting it didn’t count as under-age magic." Huh? I thought you'd mentioned in one of your earlier author's notes that you're aware that, canonically, there is no issue with underaged magic in magical households; children at the Burrow are under Molly and Arthur Weasley's authority, not the Improper Use of Magic Office's, because when a spell is cast there, the MInistry has no way of knowing who cast it.
The description of Harry and Ginny cooking together was very sweet; that's something that's been speculated on in discussions at FictionAlley Park. I've always maintained that Harry's kitchen skills from his childhood would carry over into adult life, and that the negative memories of the Dursleys would not keep him from enjoying cooking for, or, better yet, with his girlfriend/wife, whoever that might be.
Harry's argument to the judges sounded a lot more like an actual lawyer than any eleven-year-old I've ever met; he's letting the mask slip, and that might not be a very good idea in front of the Malfoys... not that they're likely to guess what's really going on, of course.
I don't think Dumbledore in canon was ever this arrogant and sure of himself, but we only really found that out in Book 7 -- and the one place where his confidence appeared to be misplaced, his trust in Snape, turned out not to be a mistake at all; Snape was "Dumbledore's man, through and through," from the day he went to Dumbledore and begged him to protect Lily. The only real mistakes Dumbledore made in the war were not telling Harry about the prophecy sooner, which would have averted the DoM fiasco and Sirius's death, and not taking Harry's fears about Malfoy in HBP more seriously -- Malfoy's attempts to kill Dumbledore directly were ineffectual (though dangerous enough to the people on whom they misfired), but what he did with the vanishing cabinet could have been catastrophic if Harry hadn't given his friends the Felix Felicis, and was plenty bad enough even with that.
Oh, I'm surprised I didn't think of this sooner: it's not fan-fic, but given that you like this type of time travel story (travelling back from an unbearably horrible future to change the past and make a better time line), you'd probably enjoy Eric Flint and David Drake's Belisarius novels: "An Oblique Approach," "In the Heart of Darkness," "Destiny's Shield," "Fortune's Stroke," "The Tide of Victory," and "The Dance of Time."